Mum said this man looked like Paul Newman,whose surname she’d been born with,

from the German, Neumann, to mean newcomer.I pictured their blue-eyed ancestor

resting in her cradle by the Black Sea,waiting to disperse sin across the world.

I smelled the pines on the Balkan peaks,heard the wind moving through them:

northward to Varna, Constanta, Odessa,and on its breath it carried rumours

of a new-born girl, named not for her beauty,but the mutation in her eyes.

—

Elisabeth Sennitt Clough lives in Norfolk with her husband and three children. Her pamphlet Glass was a winner in the Paper Swans inaugural pamphlet competition and became a Poetry Society ‘Top Pick’. Her debut collection Sightings was published by Pindrop Press. Her poems have appeared in The Rialto, Mslexia, Magma, Stand, I,S&T, and The Cannons’ Mouth.